Editing Our Lady of Guadalupe (section)

===Mexican culture===
[[File:Virgen de Guadalupe Notre Dame Paris Francia.JPG|thumb|200px|left|Chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the cathedral of [[Notre-Dame de Paris]], [[Paris]], France]]
[[File:LA Cathedral Lady of Guadalupe statue.jpg|right|150px|thumb| Reliquary in the [[Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels]] in [[Los Angeles]], United States, containing a fragment of the tilma of [[Juan Diego]]]]

Harringon argues that: The Aztecs... had an elaborate, coherent symbolic system for making sense of their lives. When this was destroyed by the Spaniards, something new was needed to fill the void and make sense of New Spain&nbsp;... the image of Guadalupe served that purpose.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Harrington |first1=Patricia |title=Mother of Death, Mother of Rebirth: The Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe |journal=Journal of the American Academy of Religion |date=1988 |volume=56 |issue=1 |pages=25–50 |doi=10.1093/jaarel/LVI.1.25 |jstor=1464830 }}</ref>

According to the traditional account, the name of Guadalupe, as the name was heard or understood by Spaniards, was chosen by the Virgin herself when she appeared on the hill outside Mexico City in 1531, ten years after the Conquest.<ref>[http://www.sancta.org/nameguad.html Sancta.org] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071029110356/http://www.sancta.org/nameguad.html |date=October 29, 2007 }}, "Why the name 'of Guadalupe'?", accessed November 30, 2006</ref>

Guadalupe continues to be a mixture of the cultures which blended to form Mexico, both racially and religiously,<ref name="guide">Elizondo, Virgil. [http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Dec1999/feature2.asp AmericanCatholic.org] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071026060338/http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Dec1999/feature2.asp |date=October 26, 2007 }}, "Our Lady of Guadalupe. A Guide for the New Millennium" St. Anthony Messenger Magazine Online. December 1999; accessed December 3, 2006.</ref> "the first [[mestiza]]",<ref>Lopez, Lydia. "'Undocumented Virgin.' Guadalupe Narrative Crosses Borders for New Understanding." Episcopal News Service. December 10, 2004.</ref> or "the first Mexican",<ref name="king"/> "bringing together people of distinct cultural heritages, while at the same time affirming their distinctness."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=O'Connor |first1=Mary |title=The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Economics of Symbolic Behavior |journal=Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion |date=1989 |volume=28 |issue=2 |pages=105–119 |doi=10.2307/1387053 |jstor=1387053 }}</ref> As [[Jacques Lafaye]] wrote in ''Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe'', "as the Christians built their first churches with the rubble and the columns of the ancient [[Paganism|pagan]] temples, so they often borrowed pagan customs for their own [[cult]] purposes."<ref name="lafay" >Lafaye, Jacques. ''Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe. The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1976</ref> The author Judy King asserts that Guadalupe is a "common denominator" uniting Mexicans. Writing that Mexico is composed of a vast patchwork of differences—linguistic, ethnic, and class-based—King says "The Virgin of Guadalupe is the rubber band that binds this disparate nation into a whole."<ref name="king" >{{cite news |last1=King |first1=Judy |title=La Virgen de Guadalupe - Mother of all Mexico |url=https://www.mexconnect.com/articles/1404-la-virgen-de-guadalupe-mother-of-all-mexico/ |work=MexConnect |date=May 29, 2020 }}</ref>
The Mexican novelist, [[Carlos Fuentes]], once said that "you cannot truly be considered a Mexican unless you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe."<ref>Demarest, Donald. "Guadalupe Cult&nbsp;... In the Lives of Mexicans." p. 114 in ''A Handbook on Guadalupe'', Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, eds. Waite Park MN: Park Press Inc, 1996</ref> [[Nobel Prize in Literature|Nobel Literature laureate]] [[Octavio Paz]] wrote in 1974 that "The Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments and defeats, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the [[National Lottery for Public Assistance|National Lottery]]."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Paz |first1=Octavio |chapter=Foreword |pages=ix–xxii |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fWJJua4aoGcC&pg=PR9 |editor1-last=Lafaye |editor1-first=Jacques |title=Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 |date=1987 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-46788-7 }}</ref>